A Beamforming Technique Using Rotman Lens Antenna for Wireless Relay燦etworks

Abstract

Rotman lens, which is a radio frequency beam-former that consists of multiple input and multiple output beam ports, can be used in industrial, scientific, and medical applications as a beam steering device. The input ports collect the signals to be propagated through the lens cavity toward the output ports before being transmitted by the antenna arrays to the destination in order to enhance the error performance by optimizing the overall signal to noise ratio (SNR). In this article, a low-cost Rotman lens antenna is designed and deployed to enhance the overall performance of the conventional cooperative communication systems without needing any additional power, extra time or frequency slots. In the suggested system, the smart Rotman lens antennas generate a beam steering in the direction of the destination to maximize the received SNR at the destination by applying the proposed optimal beamforming technique. The suggested optimal beamforming technique enjoys high diversity, as well as, low encoding and decoding complexity. Furthermore, we proved the advantages of our suggested strategy through both theoretical results and simulations using Monte Carlo runs. The Monte Carlo simulations show that the suggested strategy enjoys better error performance compared to the current state-of-the-art distributed multi-antenna strategies. In addition, the bit error rate (BER) curves drawn from the analytical results are closely matching to those drawn from our conducted Monte Carlo simulations.